Page 118 of Brim Over Boot
“The elk never stops running,”he told me once.“Do you know why?”
I didn’t, not at the time.
“Every creature will find its end, my son. It’s inevitable. But we never stop fighting while we’re here. Like that elk, we fight because every moment we’re on this earth, no matter how big or small, is worth fighting for.”
I wipe under my eye as I turn from the railing, my gaze skipping down my arm. Tugging up my sleeve, I look at the antlers inked into my skin. The memory of my dad. Of the lessons he taught me about love and perseverance andliving. He lived such a big life while he was here. He loved deeply. Me. My mother. He taught me compassion for the world around me. How to see through a lens that’s not my own.
And instead of using that compassion, I held a grudge against the one person least deserving of it. I turned the man against me, made him my enemy, and then I fell in love with him despite it all.
What kind of sick, cosmic joke is that?
I pull my helmet back into place, swing my leg over my bike, and get on the road.
The lights are on when I pull into my driveway, the sky around me dark. A quick check of my phone shows several missed calls from Colton. Looking at his name makes the pain in my chest flare anew.
What do I say to him?
So many years of hurt. So much pain that could have been avoided.
Goddamn it.
I walk inside the house, closing the door behind me. “Walt?”
My uncle is in the back room when I find him. He sets down his phone and looks at me over his glasses. “Wondered when you’d be back. It’s late.”
“Sorry about that,” I say, taking a seat across from him. “Did you get dinner figured out all right?”
He scoffs. “I’m perfectly capable of fending for myself, kid. Was more worried about you. Something happen?”
“You could say that,” I mumble, scrubbing my face.
“Well?” my uncle asks.
I huff. “Just found out everything I thought I knew was complete bullshit.”
“Colton?”
I raise an eyebrow. “How’d you guess?”
“Doesn’t take a genius. So what’d you learn?”
My sigh is heavy. Weighted. “That I’m the villain in this story. Not him.”
Not that he ever was a villain, not truly. An asshole, sure. But he had a right to be. Because I was an asshole to him.
My uncle makes a disagreeable sound. “You’re not a villain, Noah. The world doesn’t work like that. There’s good, and there’s bad, but there’s no absolute.”
“He’s a good guy,” I tell my surrogate father. This man who stepped up for me when I had no one else. I appreciate him more than I could possibly say. “He’s always been a good guy, Walt, but he wasn’t to me. And I thought… I don’t know. I thought there was a reason, and I hated him for it. Because I didn’t deserve that.”
“No, you didn’t,” my uncle says softly.
“But neither did he.”
The sound of crunching gravel has my head swinging toward the front of the house.
“Well,” my uncle says, opening his book and nudging up his glasses. “Now’s your time to make it right.”
“What did you do?” I ask slowly, my heart thumping. “You called him?”
